Good Friday Clarifications
Today is Good Friday, the day that Jesus of Nazareth was tortured, nailed on a cross, etc.. Regardless of your opinions about Jesus and Christianity, Jesus’ crucifixion was a massive event in human history, like an event horizon where light disappears into a black hole. I’d like to make some clarifications against popular notions of the infamous passion story.
Loosely speaking, Jesus was someone who lived in the spirit of the religious teachings of his day, who focused on caring for people in need over details about right vs. wrong. He did not see a gulf between ordinary life and a spiritual reality. He was mysteriously present and otherworldly at the same time, defying explanation, eluding control, slipping through everyone’s fingers like water. Ultimately, the people of his day got into a frenzy and killed him for living in their cultural blindspots. This is all historically valid, and doesn’t require any theology to believe.
Jesus’ crucifixion is not just the event of one man’s death but is a symbolic act representing the suffering of the whole world. Jesus the man was killed for being good and free. How many good and free things are killed for the very sake that they are good and free? This theme is a supreme tragedy. Regardless of your attitudes toward Christianity, Jesus’ crucifixion embodies this theme coming to a head; it’s the bottom line of what’s at stake in his death. Why would we call one man’s experience of this tragedy a “Good Friday?”
Unfortunately, it is easy for Christians to leverage holidays around Easter and Christmas to try and seductively force people into their cultural ideology through altar calls of conversion, obscuring the beauty of the meaning of the story. It is not fair to those with unmet spiritual needs to capitalize a sacred message for the healing of the world and turn it into a sales pitch for the trading of souls and reinvigorating intermural dogmatisms.
Now that that table has been flipped, it must be said that the story of Jesus’ suffering is for anyone. It’s the story of the human spirit being crushed. You don’t have to be a Christian to believe that or even feel sympathy with it. You don’t even have to know about Jesus to understand this theme. But if you do understand the theme, then Jesus’ story becomes a theatrical act performed on the stage of the real world.
That’s where the real importance of Jesus is for us is. It’s not in getting us to feel extremely guilty and then flip a light-switch to make us feel perfectly forgiven as a born-again believer. I’m not even asking you to believe in some sort of theological claim or to say that your suffering is inconsequential compared to the holier-than-thou suffering of Jesus Christ. Pain is always very personal and hard to externalize. What Jesus’ death does is provide us with a helpful visual story for finding each other in all our individual sufferings, for remembering.
This is why the cross of Christ is so captivating for so many people. When we see him on the cross, we see ourselves and we see the whole world dying, not because of some theological doctrine but because he lived out a spiritual theme that the whole world experiences. His crucifixion is a mirror for us. Jesus wasn’t up there being tortured as some sort of religious project to fix all of us and thereby substitute our individual identities with worship of his ego. Jesus died because he was a loving person that didn’t fit in. He felt close to God. Whatever feeling you have toward Jesus, that is good enough. You don’t need to jump through religious hoops. Your pain and innocence are valid for all time and worthy of deepest empathy.
If there is any theological doctrine that comes out of this or could perhaps explain it, so be it. But the vision of Jesus on the cross is prior to any theologizing, and so it is the responsibility of Christians to keep the image as pure and free and raw as possible. Jesus was tortured to death by people getting swamped in their customs and ideologies. Don’t likewise kill the spirit with your theology, lest you keep the poor out of the kingdom of heaven.
